Annotationi et Discorsi Supra Alcuni Luoghi del Decameron ....

Florence: Giunti, 1574. First Edition.. Full contemporary stiff vellum.. Good; modest mottled damp staining to the first 4 leaves and last three; small tear to upper blank margin of the title; small repaired (16th century!) paper flaw in a blank portion of the gutter near the top margin of the title.. 4to, [40], 142, [16 - index, errata, colophon] pp. Several text illustrations.

"Borghini’s depth and originality as a scholar are most evident in his study of vernacular language and literature. Concern with clarifying and codifying rules for all aspects of the language we now call Italian was widespread in sixteenth-century Italy; the Florentines (truncated) thought of that language as their own—la lingua fiorentina—and regarded its great literary tradition, represented by Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, as a fundamental feature of their cultural identity. A private literary academy that had been established for the study and cultivation of the vernacular was made over at Cosimo’s order into an official organ of state, the Accademia Fiorentina, and charged with the task of publishing authoritative editions of classic texts, as well as contemporary scholarly works that would demonstrate the literary potential of the vernacular and the primacy of Florence in determining standards of correct and elegant usage. Borghini was not a member of the Accademia Fiorentina: though his work was closely related, his approach was in some respects distinctive. More than the great canonical texts that were the primary object of study for the academicians, he examined all kinds of literary artifacts: chronicles, diaries, letters, record books, translations, and popular writings of various kinds. His real object was the language itself: for him, the great classics of the fourteenth century, such as the Divine Comedy or the Decameron, were ultimately documents of the spoken language at a privileged—what we would call “classic”—moment in its development. He had an extraordinarily acute sense of the way the language had changed over time, and came to believe that from the period of its pristine perfection in the Trecento, it had gradually been corrupted by the introduction of words and grammatical forms from other parts of Italy. While lingua was in decline, however, verbal and literary artifice—arte—had improved, preserving and refining the best linguistic forms, so that the rules of good speech and writing, while no longer to be gathered from everyday usage, were still recuperable" (from Richard's, Vasari and Vincenzo Borghini). Shaaber p. 101; absent from Adams. (Inventory #: 21131)